Over the past 23 years, the £60m turnover business – headquartered in Sheffield – has grown steadily by selling hardware, telephony and associated technology support. But committed to ‘helping clients buy better’ the value-added-reseller has been on a transformational journey over the last 18 months, to bolster its offering to its 4,500 customers.
Now – with Vapour on board – any client seeking an integrated technology solution complete with IT and telephony devices, voice and video communications, network connectivity, secure cloud storage, all associated licenses and support, can come to Millgate rather than sourcing multiple suppliers with differing service levels and billing protocol.
Commenting on the partnership, Millgate’s group head of sales Steve Dono said: “It’s no secret that IT and telephony has come together – clients now want a secure, unified comms solution, with consistently high service levels across the board. Tech now needs to support flexible working, be scalable to reflect the fluidity of business, and have an integrated disaster recovery strategy as standard. It needs to be quick, cost effective, compliant and feature-rich.
“We’ve therefore been on a massive journey to enhance our proposition over the past five years, and in the last 24 months this transformation has really started to take shape. We don’t just want to provide piecemeal advice to clients – we want to help them make savvy, technology-led business decisions that will power greater connectivity, efficiency and growth. But we needed the right partner on board for Millgate to be able to fulfil this vision.
“While 80% of our revenue is currently coming from the sale of hardware I see this shifting to 60% in favour of us deploying more unified communications solutions. This is a significant time for our organisation.”
Vapour’s widely-publicised 50% growth – not least due to the rapid upsurge in Avaya licenses sold – made the Yorkshire business an attractive partner.
“We admire companies that are clear on being ‘best of breed’ in their space,” elaborated Steve. “We know from first-hand experience that it isn’t always easy to define such a sharp level of focus. But Vapour really owns the digital transformation environment, particularly because they now work so closely with Avaya.”
Tim Mercer, Vapour Cloud’s CEO, added: “We’ve been very vocal about Vapour’s partner strategy. Millgate is one of the top 100 VARs in the UK, so this is exactly the type of collaboration we’ve been actively seeking – we don’t supply hardware and IT support, so we complement each other well.
“Millgate has a nationwide presence, and they’re currently undergoing one of their most exciting periods of change internally, to build an even more compelling proposition for colleagues, clients and vendors alike. It’s the perfect time to be on board with their revolution.”
To support the company’s ongoing growth, Millgate is set to create six new sales and engineer roles in the next three months.